All Quiet on the Western Front. Erich Maria Remarque
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had turnip bread, lunch turnip stew, and for supper turnip cutlets and turnip salad.
next time when you come with your mess-tin have a cigar or a chew of tobacco in the other hand, get me?
great guts, kat, how did you come by that?
I traded ginger three pieces of para-chute silk for it.
in civilian life Katczinsky is a cobbler, but he understands all trades.
we couldn’t do without katczinsky. he has a sixth sense. it’s a good thing to be friends with him, as kropp, haie westhus, and I are.
long time since you’ve had any-thing decent to eat, eh?
21
kropp talks to an artilleryman who has been some time in this neighborhood.
we are just dozing off when the door opens and kat appears, carrying two loaves of bread under his arm and a blood-stained sandbag full of horse-flesh.
for example, they once moved us toward the front, into what was a small dark fac-tory. there are beds in it, or rather bunks, made with a couple of wooden beams over which wire netting is stretched. the wire netting is hard, and there is nothing to put on it. our water-proof sheets are too thin. we use our blan-kets to cover our-selves.
kat takes haie westhus and goes off to explore. they find a horse box and return with arms full of straw.
now we might sleep if we weren’t so terribly hungry.
is there a canteen anywhere abouts?
is there a what? there’s noth-ing to be had here. you won’t find so much as a crust of bread.
cut somewood.
we’ll have to starve until sup-plies arrive.
22
kat knows the way to roast horse-flesh so that it’s tender. it shouldn’t be put straight into the pan, that makes it tough. it should be boiled first in a little water.
this is kat. he finds everything. if it is cold, a small stove and wood, hay and straw, a table and chairs. but above all food.
we have settled ourselves outside on the sunny side of the factory. there is the smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet. an air battle is going on overhead. kropp washes his socks and kat lets off a mighty fart.
we discuss many subjects; after a while we get on the subject of himmelstoss, our old drill sergeant.
it is uncanny; one would think he conjured it out of the air.
every littlebean must be heard as well as seen.
23
tjaden has a special grudge against himmelstoss. tjaden wet his bed at night in his sleep. himmelstoss maintained that it was sheer laziness and invented a method worthy of himself for curing tjaden.
that’s the uniform.
...then how does it come that he's such a bully as a drill sergeant?
surely himmelstoss wasa very different fellow as a postman...
sometimes if you give a man a little authority he will snap at it, just like a dog goes after a piece of meat.
the army is based on that;
one man mustalways have power over the other. and the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it takes him.
they say, of course, there must be disci-pline.
they always do. and it may be so; still it oughtn’t to become an abuse.
hey, what’stjaden so excited about?
himmelstoss is on his way...
...he’s coming to the front!
24
he found another piss-a-bed and quar-tered him with tjaden, one in the bunk above the other. the next night they were changed over and the lower one put on top so that he could retaliate.
with the thought of himmelstoss coming to the front, haie westhus smiles and rubs his hands together. he remembers our final day at the training camp.
haie, kropp, tjaden, and myself had sworn to square accounts with himmelstoss. we knew which pub he visited every evening.
returning to the barracks he had to go along a dark, uninhabited road.
we waited for him behind a pile of stones.
we leaped out with a bed-cover I had brought and threw it over his head from behind and pulled it round him so that he stood there unable to raise his arms.
the matter ended with one of them sleeping on the floor, where he frequently caught cold.
this accom-plished noth-ing. anyone who looked at their sallow skin could see that.
it was our finest day in the army.
alone?
alone.
haie was the first on him and delivered such a blow on the sack as would have felled an ox.
haie let him get a gasp of air every so often.
tjaden unbuttoned himmelstoss’s braces and pulled down his trousers. he then went to work on him with a small whip.
we had to drag tjaden off of him to get our turn. finally haie stood him back up for one last remonstrance.
himmelstoss yelled and made off on all fours, his striped postman’s backside gleaming in the moonlight.
we disappeared at full speed.
he never discovered whom he had to thank for the business.
revenge is black-pudding.
25
himmelstoss started to yell, but haie had brought a cushion. he pressed it down on himmelstoss’s face while we worked on him.
we have to go up on wiring fatigue. the motor lorries roll up after dark and we jammed in together, shoulder to shoulder, there is no room to sit. it is a warm evening and the twilight seems like a canopy under whose shelter we feel drawn together. mu ̈ller is in a good mood for once; he is wearing his new boots.
even over the sound of the motor, kat and I hear the cackle of geese from a nearby farmyard.
the lorries arrive at artillery gun- emplacements, and the roar of the guns makes our lorry stagger...
...we are now within the front’s embrace.
as we leave the lorries, english batteries fire from beyond the right of our lines. our faces change imperceptibly. men who have been up as often as we have become thick-skinned, but the young recruits become agitated.
...now you’ll hear the burst.
that was a twelve-inch. you can tell by the report...
kat, I hear some aspirants for the frying pan.
26
the sentence has the sharpness